Unlike this last category of systems, safety and security systems of the type of this invention do not have the purpose of managing military operations. They have the goal of dealing with violations of specific laws and regulations and with certain type of threats like terrorism, drug smuggling, counterfeiting or environmental hazard. In most countries, dealing with these threats is the responsibility of one or more administrative agencies or ministerial departments, sometimes coordinated by a homeland security department. The system is based on a variety of sensors of different technologies (electromagnetic, electro-optical, electro-acoustic) such as radars, sonars, laser imaging systems and communication equipment such as VHF transmission. These devices are either permanently positioned in adequate locations or on-board a carrier. The carrier may be a terrestrial, above or under water vehicle or an aircraft, all manned or unmanned, a buoy or a satellite. It is also possible that one or more specific sub-systems also report intelligence data collected from sources such as communications monitoring, on-field human observation, Internet traffic supervision or like means.
A privileged domain to use such systems is safety and security since all risks mentioned above are possibly present and a significant number of agencies may be involved. But prior art systems have significant limitations.
A first limitation of prior art systems which have the purpose of addressing multiple threats, is that sensor monitoring systems generally process instant tracks. Data from multiple sensors may be fused and identification data may be obtained from Automatic Identification Systems (AIS) which have been made compulsory by the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) on-board commercial ships above a certain size. But then the operators of the operations centers are left without more assistance to help them correlate instant-track and non-instant-track data, for instance data coming from different sensors and from intelligence sources or effectuate consistency checks, analyse deviations from expected patterns in order to detect anomalies with a sufficient level of confidence. Lack of integration of streams of data from different origins has the consequence of complex man machine interfaces and of lower efficiency of the operators who have decisions to make.
A second limitation of prior art systems becomes apparent at the time of designing a system of this kind. These systems are of a “man-in the loop” (MITL) type in the sense that they require human intervention before an action is taken. As a consequence, the Human Computer Interface (HCI) is even more critical than to other systems to the operational efficiency of the system and its manning requirements. The standard specification process is to address the technical specification items independently from the operational requirements. The lack of integration of the two categories of goals, inputs and constraints will result in significant redesign at various stages to the project and in a sub-optimal system at the end, in terms of reliability of the alerts and overall operational cost.